Relative Risk

Looking over my transcript as I apply for medical schools reminds me that I took some significant risks on my way to graduation. For instance, I chose to take Epidemiology 511 during the fall quarter of my Junior year. Epi 511 is a graduate level course offered through the School of Public Health, billed as "epidemiology for non-majors". A friend of mine had taken a 400 level epidemiology class and loved it, and I was fresh off my first microbiology success that previous spring so I thought I might enjoy exploring the topics further. When I probed into the course description, the only suggested prerequisite was an undergraduate statistics class, which I had taken and done well in. I decided to email the professor and see if he would let me in, and he agreed. Looking back on this series of events now I realize that things could easily have gone terribly wrong. However, I ended up proving to myself that I could tackle just about any challenge I set for myself.

The course proceeded thus: I made friends with some students earning their Masters in Public Health and we formed a small study group. I attended lectures religiously, annotated my book, and covered it with stickies in preparation for our open book exams. I followed up with one of the TAs when I received corrected homework to make sure I really understood the concepts. And then came the final paper and exam. I had never been in a class where we had both a cumulative final and a big paper due within days of each other and that timeline alone was daunting. To make things even scarier, the assignment for the final paper was to analyze a study using the techniques we'd learned in class and then write about how they could resolve issues and improve their study. Needless to say, it was nothing like the work I had done up until that point. Who was I to give any sort of critique about a professional, grant-funded, published research study? I think I was also frightened by the standards by which I was going to be judged. I had this idea that graduate level courses were enormously difficult and that because the things they were teaching were applicable to real careers that there was more on the line. In a panic, I arranged a meeting with one of the TAs to go over my draft and make sure I wasn't going to tank the assignment and end up failing to meet the challenge I had set for myself by taking the class. I also decided to write a ten page extra credit paper in an attempt to safeguard my grade in case I just crashed and burned on both the paper and the final exam. The paper and the extra credit appear below.

Much to my surprise, I aced the class. What I hadn't realized was that the grading scale for graduate level coursework is far more relaxed than the dog-eat-dog undergraduate curves I was used to. The hard work I had put in paid off to an even greater degree than it would have in an undergraduate level class, and in more ways than simply boosting my GPA. I showed myself that I could rise to meet a significant challenge and produce quality work even when I was out of my depth. My success in this class armed me with confidence and inspired me to continue to take risks that have lead to many educational payoffs. For example, I think part of the reason I tackled the microbiology degree wholeheartedly, committing to packed quarters and a full extra year, instead of settling for a minor was because I was fortified with confidence from my success in epidemiology.I knew I could succeed.At this point, risk almost became another chemoattractant. Not the "ride-your-motorcycle-real-fast" kind of risk, but the "that-looks-hard-let's-try-it-and-see" kind of risk.

Epidemiology also helped fortify my interest in population-level health and how health research is done. It was fascinating to find out things like what mortality rates really measure, how to trace a disease outbreak within a population, and how we know smoking increases the risk of lung cancer. It made me want to figure out these kinds of things myself. The call of the public health chemoattractant grew stronger. Most importantly though, I was given tools to evaluate the kinds of data presented in both my anthropology and microbiology classes. Because I had done the paper on study design and criticism, I looked at graphs, samples, and data with a more skeptical and discerning eye than before. I felt like I had learned how to evaluate validity rather than just understand conclusions, and that made me feel like I could make my own informed decisions about what data and results meant.